LG cuts full-year smartphone sales forecast by 20%

On Thursday LG’s Park Jong Seok, head of the mobile phone business, announced that his company is cutting its full-year smartphone sales forecast by 20% and now expects to sell 24 million smartphones in 2011, down from its earlier forecast of 30 million units. According to Bloomberg, Park noted that the mobile phone business is “slowly” improving but couldn’t provide a firm time on when investors would see improvement on the company’s balance sheet. “It’s hard to give an exact timing, because there are so many market variables, and the situation changes quickly,” he said. Park expects LG to sell 1.7 million units of its new Optimus 3D smartphone by the end of the year and said “we want to differentiate ourselves with good hardware such as the 3D model by taking advantage of what we are strong at, like displays.” On June 4th, LG’s CEO, Koo Bon Joon, said that his company would have a difficult time turning around its troubled handset business during the second quarter. The company’s phone shipments were down 10% year-over-year during the first quarter of 2011, while phone sales were down 14.3% quarter-over-quarter and 9.2% year-over-year.